Comparison table

The columns have the following meaning:

Secure: does not source the PKGBUILD at all by default; or, alerts the user and offers the opportunity to inspect the PKGBUILD manually before it is sourced. Some helpers are known to source PKGBUILDs before the user can inspect them, allowing malicious code to be executed. Optional means that there is a command line flag or configuration option to prevent the automatic sourcing before viewing.

Clean build: does not export new variables that can prevent a successful build process.

Reliable parser: ability to handle complex packages by using the provided metadata (RPC/.SRCINFO) instead of PKGBUILD parsing, such as aws-cli-gitAUR.

Pacman 4.2. introduced architecture specific fields. [15]AurJson merges these fields to their generic counterparts, such as depends and makedepends: FS#48796. Helpers relying on the RPC may use the below workarounds to retrieve dependencies: